Given that this PEP is shorter, there is less to discuss. :) It seems that most people are in favor of the first part of the proposal, which is relaxing the restriction that *args must come after any keyword arguments. There is less agreement on the proposal to have non-defaulted arguments after the varargs argument; However, as I stated earlier, this is what falls out naturally from the algorithm, and restricting it to only allow defaulted arguments makes the implementation more complex.
The only really contentious issue appears to be the 'naked star' syntax, that is the use of a '*' argument without a name to indicate 'no more positional arguments'. It appears that while Guido likes this syntax, a lot of people seem dubious about it. I have to admit that while the reasoning behind the use of the '*' character is logical, the logic seems a little convoluted. Part of this is due to the use of negative logic - the absence of something that would normally be there (i.e. a keyword after the '*') indicates a restriction on what would normally be allowed (i.e. additional keyword arguments.) Looking at the suggestions that people have made, it seems that most people would find some sort of delimiter or separator character to be more natural - in other words, replacing the comma after the last positional argument with some other character. The use of a separator suggests 'dividing' or 'partitioning' the argument list into two pieces, which is, I suspect, how most people think of the problem. Unfortunately, the supply of delimiters is (de)limited. We've already been told that semicolon is a show-stopper and colon is already taken (for argument type attributes). None of the remaining characters looks particularly 'pretty' in this context, although I suppose we could get used to them in time. This, however, is only my interpretation of the discussion; others may have a difference view. At this point, I see only a few choices: 1) Drop this portion of the proposal 2) Go with the 'naked star' syntax anyway over the objections, and explain the rationale in the docs; 3) Come up with a separator character we can agree on 4) Come up with a brilliantly-devised alternative Thoughts? -- Talin _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
